04 June 2013

Happiness Rant

So this sense of oneness, this sense that we are essentially equal and in this thang together has got me on a bit of a roll. This is what I wrote following a boot camp session at Griffith park. The photos are from the aforementioned Griffith Park. Head up there and check out the beauty for yourself one morning or join me for a run sometime soon. Peace y'all. On a recent run up the incredible trails of Griffith Park, we reflected on what makes us most happy. If you think about it, or rather feel about it, if we really connect to what makes us most happy, then we are going to be the most productive in the most positive way.

Our ego's can be slave masters. Our egos are often massochistic, we tell ourselves that we must endure, suffer, work through pain to be valuable, but this is just another way the ego derives validation, by romanticising itself, your false self, as a martyr or an honorable victim. You should enjoy your work. Work should have positive and egoless connotations.Your ego will never be satisfied. It is always searching for something more. It is an annoying "one upper" that taunts you that you are never quite good enough. Your ego lies to you that your happiness lies in some future netherworld, in this way it can survive.

Watch your ego from your happy place. Watch it with a sense of humor as it tries to create a sense of identity by achieving abstract ideas, watch it strive for validation in a game set up by a society driven by egos that cling to the delusion that our thoughts are real, that our minds are our soul and that the material world we are dropped in for a short period of time is what matters. Matter does not matter so to speak.

If you ask yourself what makes you happy, what makes you feel most fulfilled and powerful in a deep sense, I bet it is a sense of connection with something not material or from the mind but from the heart and spirit. That morning at Griffith, I heard happiness expressed as: being with friends and family, sharing music and beauty with groups of people, socializing and exploring the diversity of humanity and inviting outsiders or the socially awkward into a community. Giving back, watching people grow, spending time with lovers and bonding with pets. This is what comes up when we reflect on happiness.

Not career, not accumulated wealth, not ideology and fundamental beliefs but connection.

Follow your heart and lose your mind. Your brain will do what its got to do, don't believe it when it tells you that you must achieve some societal benchmark to be valuable. That takes away from your essential power. And besides, if you let go of your mind and follow your heart and you will achieve more in the material world then you would striving to achieve something you aren't spiritually (a sense of heart) connected to.

If you follow your happiness, you will be in your most powerful state, if you are in your most powerful state you will make a profound impact on the world beyond shallow paradigms of material success and the collective delusion that our ego's are our souls. You will be connected with others on a profound level and join in a peaceful revolution that will topple political ideologies and fundamentalist belief structures by revealing them to be the rather sad, desperate attempts to be validated that they are. You will be connected with, and moving with the love that binds us all.

I grew up in New Zealand and have settled in Los Angeles. I am curious, ever-changing and I am continually grateful to exist and experience. I love helping people discover their strength and power and I seek to make the world more loving and enlightened in any small way I can.